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While testing may take as long as it takes, what happens if the time available is less than what is required. Has the application been tested with sufficient coverage so that the organization is releasing with confidence. In today's world, the delivery teams need to look for ways to become more efficient and effective in their testing process and deliver software of higher quality at the speed their customer demand. To better understand the challenges Testers face, we asked the Testing community about their jobs: what distracts them, what... [More]

“Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.” – Eric Butterworth The impact of organizational culture on a successful agile transformation cannot be understated. That said; I believe we must not lose sight of the fact that an organization is composed of many different individuals. As the whole can never be greater than the sum total of its various parts, I believe it is necessary to evaluate not only the organizational culture but the individual... [More]

“ Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast ” – Peter Drucker This is the first in a series of articles that I will be writing concerning the various aspects of individual and organizational culture and their impact on agile transformations. During this journey, I will be providing my own insights, as well as those obtained from the likes of William E. Schneider, John P. Cotter, Michael Sahota, Michael Spayd, Lyssa Adkins, Frederic Laloux, and many other people who have influenced me either through my job, teaching, mentoring,... [More]

I wanted to share an upcoming event for those who might be interested. Click HERE to find out more and to register. I've also add this to our DevOps community calendar. If you haven't started syncing your personal calendar to keep up with various events, please Click HERE to get started.

This week, we have released Rational Team Concert 5.0.1 with new features to improve support for agile teams who are using Scrum and Kanban. Among other things, this new RTC version provides enhancements for planning, reporting, usability, traceability, and performance. It also includes a “hidden” capability, the “ Quick Planner Technical Preview ”. Those who are familiar with the cloud offering IBM DevOps Services may already know the Quick Planner. A similar capability is now available as... [More]

As few weeks ago I ran across a good article on adopting “Continuous Delivery practices”. In the white paper, “ Adopting IBM’s approach to continuous software delivery ,” the author, Paul Bahr discussed IBM’s adoption framework for iteratively introducing new capabilities and planning improvements. Here is the link to the survey: IBM DevOps Practices Self Assessment survey . In that article it described the first step as conducting a Devops assessment workshop... [More]

In March 2014, we released th e IB M Wo rklo ad A utom atio n as a s ervi ce (WA aaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production). In this blog I want to show you how we provide continuity of service to our customers. Using IBM UrbanCode Deploy to implement our delivery process we built,... [More]

In March 2014, we released th e IB M Wo rklo ad A utom atio n as a s ervi ce (WA aaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production). In this blog I want to show you how to build a remote package repository for IBM UrbanCode Deploy to use in the context... [More]

Evaluating Different Scaled Agile Approaches In evaluating a process we often look at the following Understand the Process: o What are the Principles, Activities, Roles, Practices, and Deliverables? o Determining how well each approach span the three levels of development? o Does the process meet the organizations needs, the needs of the team, and the individuals involved While each approach has slightly different principles, most adhere to the core... [More]

More and more businesses are attempting to adopt agile across their whole IT portfolio. From maintenance to small projects to large enterprise programs, these organizations want to take advantages of the speed and quality improvements seen by many agile teams. However as an Agile Coach, I often hear questions such as: We need to increase our time to market to stay competitive. However, our organization and culture is heavily based on a waterfall SDLC so how do we make sure our agile teams are successful in the interim?” How can we... [More]

Regardless of whether the project is following a traditional or agile methodology, making quality an integral part of the software lifecycle requires the whole team to collaborate effectively. IBM Rational Quality Manager (RQM) is a collaborative hub for test planning and managing test results. Built on the Jazz™ platform and part of the Rational solution for Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management, RQM provides organizations with a web-based test management environment that helps test management professionals. Test... [More]

Recently ran across a great article on using Rational Quality Manager in a continuous delivery DevOps pipeline . The article entitled, " Improving Quality using Rational Quality Manager as part of the Continuous Delivery DevOps Pipeline " the authors, Ajay Chebbi and Thomas Neal, discussed the importance of test automation and described how to use the ANT API to invoke automated test scripts. Making it easier for traditional, hybrid and agile teams to maintain the tests, the test environments and providing an avenue for... [More]

In March 2014, we released the IBM Workload Automation as a service (WAaaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production). In this blog I want to show you how using IBM UrbanCode Deploy we manage the environments dynamically provisioned in the SoftLayer cloud.... [More]

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspect of scaling agile is the ability to quickly identify, develop and translate large business requirements into actionable stories. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a Program management team incorporate several lean / agile principles into their existing enterprise agile adoption strategy in support of a DevOps initiative. The customer wanted to implement improvements that would allow their teams to establish agile practices along with continuous delivery, continuous testing to allow them... [More]

Abstract: This article is for anyone who wants to automate Eclipse-based UI testing seamlessly across all platforms.This article has 3 parts which will help even a beginner to easily adopt to SWTBot as a testing tool. Part1 - Installing SWTBot gives detailed steps for setting up SWTBot on Eclipse v4.2.2 , Part2 - Getting Started with SWTBot has the guide to begin UI automation with SWTBot with the assistance of SWTBot Recorder and Generator utility .In the final part, we will learn about techniques of creating a reusable automation... [More]

Scaling Agile practices in support of DevOps A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the "Release and Deploy workshop" at the 2014 Innovate conference. During the day long hands-on workshop, we learned about several new UrbanCode Release (UCR) capabilities. While there were several interesting capabilities, UCR's abilities to "visualize" the deployment pipeline and to track the del ivery lifecycle for a particular set of "applications" being released together showed how effective it... [More]

Last week, IBM DevOps Services was enriched with a new beta feature for tracking and planning. Not sure what will be the exact next of this new feature yet. Some refer to it at the Track and Plan , or the Agile Track&Plan . Other as the Agile Quick Planner . Whatever the name used, the main objective is to make access to work items easier, and to better support Scrum teams in their project activities. It is quite easy to enable this beta feature on your existing project. Simply open the project and select the "Try the new Track... [More]

The other day,some members of the IBM Rational Services team in India shared a story ... which I thought was a great DevOps adoption story worth sharing. I've taken the names out to protect the customer's privacy. What is this story about? This story is about a customer who provides comprehensive solutions and supply chain logistics management for the trav el/t rans port atio n industry, As a growing business, this customer faced challenges with the divergence of their solution based on their customers and the... [More]

When I was a kid, we would either chant or whistle when walking or driving by a graveyard. According to Wiktionary , the meaning is clear: "To enter a situation with little or no understanding of the possible consequences." Or otherwise stated, an incantation can protect you from something you ultimately can’t avoid. I.e. one day, we are all headed to the graveyard. I think about this saying a lot when talking to teams who say “we... [More]